from the most-massive-wrist-slap-to-date dept

A year-long review of a police shooting in Cleveland has finally concluded. The investigation stems from a police pursuit late last year that resulted in the deaths of both suspects in the vehicle, who were at the receiving end of 137 bullets fired by Cleveland police officers.

A state investigation previously concluded there was a systemic problem of an attitude of "refusal to look at the facts," and handed the case over the prosecutors. In August, East Cleveland's mayor said prosecutors were considering filing charges against the cops involved in the shooting, but as of this month the shooting is still being investigated.

Both suspects were killed by the barrage of gunfire. The driver, Timothy Russell, was shot 23 times. His passenger, Malissa Williams, was shot 24 times. No weapons or casings were found inside the vehicle.

The chase began when an officer thought he heard gunfire coming from the Russell's car. Another witness on the scene thought it may have just been the vehicle backfiring. Either way, it led to a 23-minute chase involving five dozen police vehicles and nearly 100 officers and supervisors. Both suspects had criminal records, which may have influenced their decision to flee.

The pursuing police were ordered to stop by their supervisors but overrode this decision because they thought a police officer had been wounded. In order to right this perceived wrong, officers chased Russell at speeds of up to 120 mph before stopping him in a middle school parking lot. Thirteen officers then fired 137 shots, a majority of them in just over 20 seconds.

An initial review of the chase found 75 patrol officers violated orders, but the disciplinary hearings reduced that number to 64 officers. All but one received a suspension, with the longest being 10 days, McGrath said.

None of the violations was so serious it warranted termination. Some of the officers received a written warning.

Police previously announced punishments for 12 supervisors stemming from the chase. One sergeant was fired. A captain and lieutenant were demoted, and nine sergeants were suspended.

Additional charges most likely await the thirteen officers who fired 137 shots into a single vehicle, including one officer who managed to squeeze off 49 rounds in less than 20 seconds. The DOJ's investigation also hangs overhead, but it could be another year or two before it reaches any conclusions. What's been handed down so far barely amounts to a slap on the wrist for the 63 officers being punished. The maximum suspension is only 10 days. Their supervisors appear to have fared worse, with one firing and two demotions.

The police officers' union has (of course) defended the actions of the thirteen shooters.

The union has said the shootings were justified because the driver tried to ram an officer.

One wonders if the union feels every bullet fired was "justified" or just the 47 kill shots. One also wonders how many stray shots (with only about a third of the shots hitting the targets) went wandering into the nearby neighborhood. The state AG's animated reconstruction (above) indicates some remedial gun safety training might be wise, as the officers form (more than once) a semi-circle, firing shots in the direction of each other. (That this hail of gunfire took place at night made it even more dangerous for everyone involved.)

For the rank-and-file, the punishments being handed down are too light to discourage insubordination and unsafe pursuits in the future. For some cops, ignoring supervisors' orders in order to "avenge" one of their own is always justified and any resulting punishments are worn as badges of honor. But make no mistake, this pursuit wasn't about justice or any higher duty. It was a squad of officers looking to extract revenge as self-appointed judges, jurors and executioners. Nothing else explains the massive number of shots fired or the dozens of officers facing (minimal) suspensions for directly disobeying orders.

from the the-law-is-sometimes-wielded-by-the-most-frightening-bullies dept

We've seen the terrible results of various anti-bullying laws, most of them written in haste and named after the victim. The tragedies are real. The resulting laws are a mess. We've seen it with "Grace's Law," Maryland's anti-bullying law written after a teen was (as it is often stated) bullied into committing suicide by online aggressors. Thanks to the overreaction, Maryland now has a direct line to Facebook to escalate takedown actions aimed at posts deemed to be "without societal value" by school administrators.

Christian Adamek, 15, hanged himself Wednesday and died this morning from his injuries, Madison County Coroner Craig Whisenant said today. Adamek's death came less than a week after he was arrested for streaking across the Sparkman High football field during the Senators' Sept. 27 football game against Grissom High School.

Though Sparkman High Principal Michael Campbell declined to comment on Adamek's death today, he told AL.com/Huntsville's news partner, WHNT News 19, on Tuesday that the incident Adamek was accused of could bring the teen major repercussions.

Adamek had been disciplined by the school district, though details of that discipline were not made public, and he faced legal charges. Sparkman High administrators recommended that Adamek have a hearing in the Madison County court system to determine if formal charges would be filed, WHNT reported.

WHNT has memory-holed its coverage, possibly due to the fact that Sparkman High's principal openly discussed Adamek's case during a brief interview. He dodges specifics, but he does drop the names of a few possible charges. (Video available here - also saved from the memory hole.)

Campbell explains minor crime can be a major ordeal. While the principal was not at liberty to discuss the specific disciplinary actions taken by the school, he did confirm the student was not at school Tuesday.

“There’s the legal complications,” says Campbell, “public lewdness and court consequences outside of school with the legal system as well as school consequences that the school system has set up.”

While he was not at liberty to divulge details that lead to the indecent display, Campbell says the incident was much more than a mere prank.

“This situation was totally different, something not related to that at all.”

Now, Principal Campbell's words are unclear. but he hints that there's something more to this than just the streaking event. Or, given the fact that he really shouldn't be talking about a case that covered both by school privacy policies and the shelter of juvenile crime laws, he may just be trying to muddy the water a bit.

Other details have emerged. Adamek was facing expulsion according to his sister. He was arrested and was potentially facing charges for public lewdness and indecent exposure, the latter of which is tied to Alabama's sex offender laws. Long story short, Adamek could have found himself registered as a sex offender as a result of his streaking.

We don't know what other factors played into Adamek's decision to take his own life, but being faced with a future as a "sex offender" couldn't have been pleasant, even if the odds of that happening were extremely slim.

When a teenager commits suicide because he felt bullied by others who said mean things about him, there is invariably a law passed to make sure it never happens again. In the pursuit of a perfect world, no child should ever feel so badly as to do himself harm. What law will they pass for Christian Adamek?

There are many things that can be said about the streak, that it was immature and stupid. No doubt someone will cry that it created a sexually hostile environment, as seems to be the cry with all things involving nudity. In response to those who call this a juvenile prank, someone will passionately explain the grave harm this does to the moral fabric of society...

And so the Sparkman High School powers of saving grace decided to drop every bomb they had on Christian Adamek. They’ll show him. He’ll never do anything like that again. And indeed, he won’t.

His fellow students called him a "legend" on Twitter. His school ensured he would greatly regret his childish act. In between, there are many, many unanswered questions, but given the general inability of most school administrators to see immature behavior as anything more than punishable violations, it's completely conceivable that Adamek had the book thrown at him. That he was arrested is indication enough that the school wished to reestablish its power through a show of force.

Did this lead directly to Adamek's suicide? There's no way to know for sure, but it probably was a factor. It's never as simple as it appears. Any suicide tied to social media bullying is more complex than the ultra-thin media coverage that often accompanies it. Suicide is usually related to a culmination of events, not one single incident, but a sudden sense of hopelessness can greatly contribute to the unfortunate decision.

And for those who might point out that Adamek had only a slim chance of being charged with two misdemeanors and placed on Alabama's sex offender registry, let me just point out that the reality of the situation isn't immediately apparent to those trapped inside, not while the machinery is still in motion.

Was Aaron Schwartz really going to go to jail for dozens of years? The odds are that his sentence would have been much lighter than what was being presented by the government's prosecutors. Any amount of prison time is hell to face for most people, but staring into a chasm that has suddenly opened up under your feet and seeing nothing but blackness staring back is seriously debilitating, even for otherwise healthy, happy people.

Adamek was likely being presented with the worst case scenario this early in the process. He would have expected some repercussions, but it's unlikely he considered that he'd be arrested, much less facing a possible sex offender status. During that week following his arrest, the worst case scenario would have replayed repeatedly in his mind.

How will the school spin this one? Will Sparkman's administration feel justified that it stood up to one teen and his childish action and saved the school from an unimaginable fate?

So did you show him, Principal Campbell? Are you pleased that your rules served their purpose? When you decided that the “legend,” the laughter, the applause would destroy the decorum of your school, did you consider that the price would be one young man’s life?

Chances are it won't spend much time defending itself. Why should it? It has school policy and criminal law on its side. It did the "right" thing. And either directly or indirectly as a result of the principal's decision to make one student "aware of the consequences," a 15-year-old student is no longer alive.

from the there's-no-stupid-quite-like-'broad,-inflexible-policies'-stupid dept

Let's forgo the usual preamble running down previous clashes between common sense and school weapons policies and get right to it. Here's another example of zero tolerance and the damage done, involving a seven-year-old and his dangerous gag gift/pen.

On January 15, 2013, G boarded his bus "armed" with a novelty pen that emitted a small buzz when touched, and showed it to some friends. At some point during the trip to school, the bus driver noticed the pen, asked to see it and then confiscated it from G.

Three days later, the principal of Hershey Elementary, Joy MacKenzie, called G's parents and told them their son had violated the school weapons policy. They were asked to remove him from the school immediately and then handed down a four-day suspension for his violation. At no point were G's parents allowed to contest the decision.

Here's the school's extremely broad definition of "weapon."

Weapon - the term shall include by way of example and not limitation, any poison gas, knife, cutting instrument, cutting tools, nunchaku stick, firearm, shotgun, rifle, and any other tool, instrument or implement capable of inflicting bodily injury or property damage, and shall include any item that is represented to be a weapon, that is threatened to be used as a weapon, or that has the appearance or characteristics of a weapon, such as a toy gun or water pistol.

Unless you consider a very mild shock to be "bodily injury," there's no way a novelty buzzing pen falls under any part of this weapons policy. I suppose it could be argued that someone could be stabbed with the pen, but that would mean the removal of every pen and pencil in the school (along with every child).

Principal MacKenzie apparently viewed the pen as a weapon and based solely on that, she has now, by virtue of this suspension, placed a seven-year-old pen wielder into the same category as actually dangerous students carrying actual weapons. The policy states that the following mandatory actions are carried out for any violations.

Violation of this policy by any student shall result in the following:

1. Immediate exclusion from class or activity. 2. Notification of the Derry Township Police Department. 3. Contact of custodial parent. 4. Immediate exclusion from the school for a ten (10) day out-of-school suspension will be imposed, whereupon a minimum of one (1) year expulsion will be recommended to the superintendent and School Board for ratification. At the discretion of the superintendent, the determination of discipline, including the immediate ten (10) day out-of-school suspension and the one (1) year expulsion, may be modified on a case-by-case basis.

Such expulsion shall be given in conformance with formal due process proceedings required by law.

Presumably, this "incident" was also reported to local law enforcement (per policy), although there seems to be no documentation included of the responding officer's hearty laughter accompanying the sound of a phone being placed back on the cradle. (Or, failing that, the officer's immediate visit to Hershey Elementary to detain the dangerous thug using all available [but appropriate -- always appropriate] restraint methods.)

Considering the policy provides for a minimum 10-day suspension, it appears the superintendent (Joseph McFarland) overrode the minimum at his discretion, dropping it to four days. Unfortunately, his discretionary skills failed to remove the suspension entirely and ask that administration not bother him again until a student brings a real weapon to school, or at least, something resembling a real weapon.

It should be noted that the policy provides for "formal due process proceedings as required by law," but apparently that sentence is just boilerplate the district forgot to delete before publication. According to the lawsuit, the parents were given no avenue of recourse or protest, which poses a problem for the school.

The District has arbitrarily deprived G of his state-created property interest in public schooling without due process of law on the basis of nothing but hysterical and overly-zealous application of a constitutionally-deficient school policy.

Beyond that, the lawsuit states that the policy itself is unconstitutionally vague and contrary to Pennsylvania state law.

The Weapons Policy is facially unconstitutional for vagueness under the First Amendment because it fails to define with specificity the kind of activity that is proscribed so that a student can conform his or her conduct to the Policy's requirements. Pennsylvania criminal law requires that any potential bodily harm from an item alleged to be a weapon be "serious" as an appropriate limiting condition--a condition absent from the School District's policy...

[T]he district applies the weapons policy to items which are incapable of inflicting bodily harm or even creating a reasonable fear in any person that such items might cause bodily harm…

The lawsuit is also seeking a permanent injunction against the district's enforcement of this policy as well as the expungement of the violation from G's record.

Could the school have known that this ridiculous abuse of its weapons policy would have resulted in a lawsuit? Well, anything's possible, but I would imagine that was the furthest thing from the minds of MacKenzie and McFarland when they put their heads together and suspended a student for four days for possession of a novelty pen. Instead, the administrators pursued the "overzealous application" of an already exceedingly-broad policy. Trimming the suspension down from 10 days was likely supposed to implicitly signal that G's offense was minor, but the reality of the situation is that it should never have gotten to this point. The school may defend its actions by stating it erred on the side of caution, but that's a lousy, worn-out excuse. These policies are in place but there's no reason they can't be applied using some common sense filtering.

It's unlikely the court will grant the permanent injunction, but maybe the dust the suit's kicked up will push the school towards narrowing the scope of the policy and generally encouraging the administration to remember the human minds on its staff are perfectly capable of making reasonable decisions when not hampered by inflexible policies that greatly discourage discretionary decisions.

from the a-new-high-in-low dept

How did we get to the point where activities conducted on someone's private property can somehow fall under the jurisdiction of a public school? The short version is this: concerns about actual criminal activity on school grounds led to tighter controls being built into policies. A few school shootings upped the ante and provoked disproportionate reactions from several legislators. And just in case no one felt the new weapon and violence policies erected to prevent the unpreventable weren't being taken seriously enough, the government "helpfully" tied these new rules to federal funding.

"Playing it safe" just isn't good enough anymore. Every administrator is compelled to err on the (uber-ridiculous) side of caution because to do otherwise might result in angry parents, or worse, the loss of federal funding. Anything that bears a slight resemblance to a gun is treated as the real thing -- a weapon powerful enough to kill someone -- even if that "weapon" is a Pop Tart, four fingers and a thumb or drawn on a piece of paper.

Three Virginia Beach seventh graders learned their fates Tuesday morning when they were suspended for shooting airsoft guns on private property.

During a hearing with a disciplinary committee Tuesday morning, Aidan Clark, Khalid Caraballo and a third friend were given long-term suspensions in a unanimous vote. The suspensions will last until June, but a hearing will be held January 27 to determine if they will be allowed back in school sooner.

Here's a little backstory:

Like thousands of others in Hampton Roads, Caraballo and Clark play with airsoft guns. The boys were suspended because they shot two other friends who were with them while playing with the guns as they waited for the school bus September 12.

The two seventh graders say they never went to the bus stop with the guns; they fired the airsoft guns while on Caraballo's private property.

The bus stop in question is 70 yards away. Three days before the above incident (Sep. 9), a parent of one these students' friends placed a 911 call to report her concern about Caraballo's use of a fake gun on his own property.

A neighbor saw Khalid shooting the airsoft gun in his front yard. She told the dispatcher, "He is pointing the gun, and it looks like there's a target in a tree in his front yard". [The "target" the caller referred to is an actual target that comes with the Airsoft gun -- not a "target" as in "the person being shot at."]

The caller also knew the gun wasn't real and said so, "This is not a real one, but it makes people uncomfortable. I know that it makes me (uncomfortable), as a mom, to see a boy pointing a gun," she told the 911 dispatcher.

Issue #1: Who the fuck calls 911 to report being "uncomfortable?" Everyone knows, even children, that 911 is for emergencies only and not for reporting that you strongly feel a neighbor's kid shouldn't be playing with a fake gun on his own property. What's even worse about this busy-bodied, overweening "concern" is that her personal Neighborhood Watch & Comfortability Patrol didn't even keep her own child from playing with the (fake) gun-toting neighbor neighbors.

Ironically, that 911 caller's son was playing with Khalid and Aidan in the Caraballo front yard on September 12. There were six children playing in an airsoft gun war. "We see the bus come. We put the gun down. We did not take the airsoft gun to the bus stop. We did not take the gun to school," Khalid explained.

Aidan admits shooting the caller's son in the arm, and Khalid admits shooting another friend in the back. "He knew we had the airsoft gun. He knew we were playing. He knew people were getting shot. We were shooting at the tree, but he still came and even after he was shot he still played," referring to the son of the 911 caller.

This 911 caller seems better suited to parenting other people's children, seeing as her son wandered into the "war zone" unattended.

Despite her call to 911, the police department found there was nothing much to get excited about, according to this statement from Virginia Beach police sergeant Adam Bernstein:

We understand that a number of juveniles possess air soft guns and have “airsoft gun” wars with each other, but as it relates to the city code referenced above, they are in violation of the code if the juveniles are not exercising “reasonable care”. Also keep in mind that this is not something that we proactively seek out to enforce. If we receive a complaint (such as in the case for which you are doing the story on), we will investigate the call for service and enforce it appropriately, i.e. warning or prosecution…

However, a few days later (Sep. 12), a "passing motorist" called the police to report a child with a gun chasing another child down the street "near a Larkspur bus stop." This call confirms that at least one of the students (Khalid Caraballo) did not leave his yard while playing with his airsoft gun.

" ... the white child appeared to have a gun, and he was chasing the other child ... when he saw me he kind of stuck it in his pants. I don't know if it was a toy or if they were playing," said the 911 caller in the Sept. 12 call.

The caller was speaking about 12-year-old Aidan Clark, who admits he ran off Caraballo's property into the street in front of Khalid's house.

"I ran and chased him. I aimed to shoot, and I saw a car on the right," Clark said.

"He looked directly at me and the black child kept on running," the 911 caller said.

Aidan was chasing a third child, who is African American and who was also suspended. Aidan says Khalid never left his property and none of the boys shot the guns while in the street.

In the course of the investigation, conducted in concert with a police officer and the school division Office of Safety and Loss Control, we identified the children who were firing pellet guns at each other and at people near the bus stop. Several students verified that they had been hit by pellets and had the marks to support their claims. In one instance, a child was only 10 feet from the bus stop and ran from the shots being fired but was still hit. Another student claimed to be shot in the back while running away during a previous incident Wednesday, Sept. 11. This child was also shot in the arm and head during Thursday’s incident. I contacted the school division’s Office of Student Leadership and School Board Legal Counsel for guidance. Because students were on their way to or at a school bus stop when they were struck by pellets, the school division has jurisdiction to take disciplinary actions against those students responsible for the disruption. There is an expectation that all students should be able to travel to and from school in the safest environment possible.

This statement leaves out a whole lot of details and relies heavily on Delaney's punishment-n-seriousness depiction of the events. According to the students, they were playing together. Delaney's wording makes it appear as though students were ambushed on their way to school. Either if they were, what happens outside of school isn't the school's jurisdiction, no matter what the legal counsel for the school board thinks. A school cannot assure that children are able to travel back and forth to school safely. The only environment it can even possibly control is the school bus.

Is the school actually taking the position that it's responsible for students' safe transit at any point between school and home? If so, then every parent whose kid is injured in any way while walking or biking to school has a valid claim against the school. That surely can't be what Delaney or his legal counsel want.

This should have been left where it was originally -- with the police if they felt like following up on the situation. The public streets are theirs to police. If it happened entirely in someone's yard, this should have been left up to the parents/property owners. Instead, administration decided to extend its territory solely for the purpose of enforcing its own stupid policies.

More from Delaney:

As the principal of Larkspur Middle School, I am responsible for the safety of students and will take all appropriate actions to ensure that the students using the pellet guns are appropriately disciplined and held responsible for their conduct. It is my sincere hope that they will learn important life lessons; the most important being that there will be consequences when they do things that can result in harm to another person.

This isn't the lesson you're teaching, Mark. You're teaching that every action a students takes, whether truly harmful or not, has the possibility of being severely punished by self-appointed, state-sponsored "saviors" like yourself, people who think nothing of damaging children's futures in order to assert and extend their authority.

Khalid and two other students have been suspended for possibly an entire year for shooting pellets at other students -- students that may have been actively and voluntarily playing with the suspended "shooters." Does adding a damaging long-term suspension to their transcripts seems like a fair tradeoff for some ultimately harmless pellet gunplay that occurred entirely off-campus (and on private property)? If so, your sense of proportion is severely out of whack, Mark.

Even more:

This was a dangerous situation that involved the intervention of law enforcement, the Office of Safety and Loss Control and our school administration.

Bullshit, Matthew. You're lying. Nothing was "dangerous." No one "intervened." Someone reported something to the police who reported it to you. The incident was over. It occurred before school, off school grounds and was entirely over by the time you decided to teach these students some "life lessons." This is you adding some spin in order to make it sound as though you've somehow averted a future tragedy with your swift, harsh overreaction. But the only thing you've done is shown everyone that you have no fear of extending your reach and expanding your jurisdiction.

The school board has issued a statement backing Principal Delaney's decision while going out of its way to take a swing at the press and detail Khalid Caraballo's disciplinary record (and has been "helpfully" provided in jpeg format).

We live and work in an era when school safety is foremost in everyone's mind. Yet somehow student safety has taken a back seat in the intense media coverage of this case. This is not an example of a public educator overreaching. This was not zero tolerance at all. This was a measured response to a student safety threat. A school principal took firm steps to ensure weapons didn't make their way into his school and that children didn't have to endure being shot at with a pellet gun as they walked to their bus stop...

All of that might be considered to be true if the final decision from the school board didn't state that the students were being suspended for "possession, handling and use of an Airsoft gun" -- something that did not occur on school property. So, it was definitely overreach, and the possibility of being suspended for an entire year for something that occurred outside of school sure sounds like an overreaction.

The school board's letter continues, detailing Khalid Caraballo's disciplinary record (which includes "increasingly aggressive behavior including harassment, bullying and fighting that resulted in injuries") in order to justify its decision to claim public streets and private yards as its jurisdiction. While this lends more credence to the suggestion that these kids were ambushing students on their way to the bus stop, it doesn't change the fact that the location where these events occurred is the jurisdiction of local law enforcement -- and ultimately, a problem to be handled by the police and parents of the children.

Daniel Edwards, chairman of the school board, states that he can discuss Caraballo's previous discipline problems because his parents signed a waiver. (None of the other students are mentioned by name in this report.) But his parents maintain they never gave him the permission to do so.

His parents told 10 On Your Side they are upset by that and said they signed a waiver for the school system to talk to WAVY about the airsoft incident only.

Edwards wraps up the letter by bemoaning the press and its "sensational" coverage of the incident.

Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt in this latest incident, but they could have been. Had a child been injured either by a weapon or as a result of fleeing the scene, the school may have been the subject of a different kind of news story; one that included accusations of turning a blind eye toward student safety. We hope that people will look beyond the sensational media reports and recognize that fact.

If you think you're going to be roasted no matter what decision you make, maybe you should make fewer lousy decisions. Kicking these students out of school doesn't change the fact that they live close to the bus stop and could easily return to attacking other students (if that's what actually happened). All this decision has done is made these three kids "not your problem," at least not until next January. And all that means is they're right back where they started -- in public streets and private property -- not your problem. If the media chooses to excoriate you because someone got injured on private property or public walkways, that says more about the media than anything else. But their overreaction doesn't justify one of your own.

from the reportedly,-assailant-also-made-'pew-pew-pew'-noises-with-his-mouth dept

Much like non-terroristic threats are now the new terroristic threats, in today's climate of zero tolerance policies, fake weapons have become the new real weapons. Pop tart bitten into a vaguely gun-ish shape? That's a weapon. Fingers clasped together in a gun-like fashion? That's a weapon. Drawing of a gun? That's a weapon. And now, virtual, video-game, only-appear-on-a-powered-up-iPhone guns? Those are weapons.

A student at H. L. Bourgeois High School accused of using a mobile phone app to simulate shooting his classmates was booked and jailed in Terrebonne Parish.

There's no part of that preceding sentence that isn't mind-flayingly ridiculous. Want to see how lifelike this "simulation" is? Here's some "exciting" video of the app (Real Strike) in action.

If you'll note, the other mall patrons don't seem the least bit alarmed that someone is firing off round after virtual round at them with an iPhone. In fact, everyone looks completely unaware, not to mention unscathed. I suppose it might be a bit more unsettling if this were uploaded and publicly viewable [oh wait...], but the emphasis is on "a bit." Unless you're Major Malcolm Wolfe of the Terrebonne Sheriff's Department.

[Major Malcolm] Wolfe's office says a 15-year-old was arrested after posting a video on YouTube using the Real Strike app to shoot other kids at school, “He said it was a result of him being frustrated and tired of being bullied. He said that he had no intentions of hurting anybody. We have to take all threats seriously and we have no way of knowing that without investigating and getting to the bottom of it.”

He says the student was arrested for terrorizing and interference of the operation of a school.

Wolfe says "investigating," but nothing else in his statements indicates any sort of investigation has taken place. As for the charges, they seem disproportionate, to say the least. No one was terrorized or interfered with while the video was being recorded. After the video was uploaded, there still wasn't much "terrorizing" or "interfering" occurring. People were being not being physically shot by an arsenal of fake weapons contained entirely within a kid's cell phone, nor were they being threatened in any specific sense. Just because it was (temporarily) uploaded to YouTube doesn't suddenly make the "shooting" more "real."

A. Terrorizing is the intentional communication of information that the commission of a crime of violence is imminent or in progress or that a circumstance dangerous to human life exists or is about to exist, with the intent of causing members of the general public to be in sustained fear for their safety; or causing evacuation of a building, a public structure, or a facility of transportation; or causing other serious disruption to the general public.

B. It shall be an affirmative defense that the person communicating the information provided for in Subsection A of this Section was not involved in the commission of a crime of violence or creation of a circumstance dangerous to human life and reasonably believed his actions were necessary to protect the welfare of the public.

C. Whoever commits the offense of terrorizing shall be fined not more than fifteen thousand dollars or imprisoned with or without hard labor for not more than fifteen years, or both.

That's a whole lot of time served and a hefty fine for playing an iPhone game. It's going to be pretty hard for a prosecutor to make this stick as none of the above really applies to the teen's actions. Some concerned parents contacted the authorities after viewing the video, but it's hard to believe the student's actions resulted in creating "sustained fear" or a "serious disruption." The school wasn't evacuated or put on lock down so other than someone in administration overreacting (and there's no details suggesting anyone has), there's really no "interference" there.

But I guess this all depends on whether the prosecutor is as easily moved to overreaction as the Sheriff's Department is. Wolfe sounds overly worried. Let's hope that's not contagious.

“You can’t ignore it,” says Major Malcolm Wolfe. “We don’t know at what time that game becomes reality.”

I don't know, Maj. Wolfe, but I'll try to guess. It becomes reality when the student has access to 25 military-grade weapons? Or access to any weapons? The willingness and ability to actually gun down his classmates with real weapons? His parents stated their son didn't have access to any guns. But still: safety.

Here's the money quote, the one that indicates that "safety" means overreacting.

“With all the school shooting (sic) we’ve had in the United States, it’s just not a very good game to be playing at this time,” according to Wolfe.

With all the school shootings? As a member of law enforcement, it might do Wolfe some good to exchange his hysteria for facts. The number of mass shootings (school or otherwise) isn't rising. Just because something happened recently doesn't mean it's increasing and just because you want to arrest a kid for exercising a little non-violent catharsis doesn't make this belief any more true.

And for all the tough talk by school districts and other authority figures about fighting bullying, it's the bullied kid who ends up in cuffs. Nice one, Team Safety First.

from the not-this-again dept

It's getting ridiculous just how frequently this sort of thing is happening. We had the so-called Twitter joke trial in the UK, in which Paul Chambers was arrested and tried for making a joke on Twitter about airport closures in which he (very obviously jokingly) "threatened" to blow the airport "sky high" if it wasn't reopened by the time he had to fly. We had the story of Joe Lipari, who was arrested for paraphrasing Fight Club on Facebook in expressing his annoyance with employees at his local Apple store. More recently, we wrote about high school kid Cam D'Ambrosio who was arrested and held without bail for making "terroristic threats," where those "threats" turned out to be some immature boastful rap lyrics that, when actually put in context, didn't actually suggest any threats at all.

The latest one involves Justin Carter, a teenager in Texas who made a joke on Facebook where he and some other kids were hassling each other over the video game League of Legends. One of the kids said something to Justin along the lines of, "Oh you're insane, you're crazy, you're messed up in the head." In response, Justin said:

'Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head, I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts,’ and the next two lines were lol and jk.

In context, there is nothing surprising or odd at all about this conversation. It's how teenaged boys communicate. They get on each other and mock each other and the response was actually pretty reasonable. One kid called him insane, and he responded by effectively mocking the claim that he was insane. And then immediately followed it up with lol and jk to cement the fact that he was kidding -- which should have been obvious to everyone anyway, even without the caveats.

But... apparently it was not obvious to the police, or to some very confused woman in Canada who called the police.

Justin Carter was arrested the next month and has been jailed since March 27. He’s charged with making a terroristic threat and is facing eight years in prison, according to his dad.

It turns out that Justin's mother actually posted a comment on our last story about Cam D'Ambrosio, which I didn't see until just now, explaining much of his story as well, and linking to a Change.org petition trying to get her son released from prison.

Once again, this situation is insane. We've reached a point where media hype and moral panics are leading law enforcement to seriously overreact to anything they think is a threat. We have no problem at all with law enforcement checking in on situations like this, but they should quickly realize what it is and move on. To arrest someone for such a joking comment on Facebook, and then to keep him in jail and legitimately claim that it was some sort of "terroristic threat," is shameful and suggests that law enforcement is more interested in building up their "stats" than actually making sure that justice is served and the public is safe.

from the school-admins-looking-to-shutter-known-arms-dealer-OfficeMax dept

A majority of human beings would look at two 7-year-old boys pretending their pencils are guns and say something about "boys being boys" or "someone's going to poke their eye out" and leave it at that. Those who craft and enforce zero tolerance policies see something more sinister. They see "threatening behavior" that must be dealt with swiftly and with as little thought as possible.

Suffolk Public Schools spokeswoman Bethanne Bradshaw said a pencil is considered a weapon when it’s pointed at someone in a threatening way and gun noises are made.

Really? Administration thinks a pencil becomes a weapon when "gun noises are made." (They don't actually think this, of course. They've just crafted a policy that states this, thus preventing administration members from "erroneously" coming to independent conclusions.) I can see a pencil being considered a weapon if it's being "pointed" (in a stabbing motion) at a sensitive area like an eyeball or a neck. Then a pencil is a weapon.

When two boys point pencils at each other and make shooting noises, a pencil is still a pencil and their imagination is doing all the heavy lifting. All it would take to "disarm" these kids is asking them to stop. Which is what a teacher did.

On the suspension note, the teacher noted that the boy stopped when she told him to do so.

Problem solved. No one is harmed and the perpetrators were left with nothing but non-threatening pencils. Why this was written on a suspension note, rather than on a simple concerned note to the parents or better yet, on NOTHING AT ALL, is beyond me. But Bradshaw has an answer for every question and a terrible excuse for every idiotic zero tolerance policy.

“Some children would consider it threatening, who are scared about shootings in schools or shootings in the community,” Bradshaw said. “Kids don’t think about ‘Cowboys and Indians’ anymore, they think about drive-by shootings and murders and everything they see on television news every day.”

Do they? My kids don't think about that kind of stuff. Then again, they rarely watch the news. Would my boys be "threatened" by a pencil gun? I doubt it. They're probably packing a pencil or two themselves during the school day. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that these hypothetical, hypersensitive children who bruise whenever the wind changes direction do not actually exist, at least not outside of statements like Bradshaw's. They're straw children.

Bradshaw also defended the moronic policy using this gem:

Bradshaw said the policy has been in place for at least two decades.

So... you're saying the administration has been stupidly overreacting since back when MTV still played music videos and no one has once thought that maybe a few policies might need to be updated or relaxed or given a good once over with a dose of context or common sense? Rules can be changed, even big, important ones. (See also: Amendments 1-27 to the Constitution, but pay close attention to nos. 18 and 21.) Nothing's so inflexible that anyone should be reduced to the rhetorical level Bradshaw is, fending off irritated parents with "Yeah, it's a shitty policy but what are you going to do. It has tenure."

Bradshaw doubles down on the importance and inflexibility of "rules" as well.

“It’s an effort to try to get kids not to bring any form of violence, even if it’s violent play, into the classroom,” Bradshaw said. “There has to be a consequence because it’s a rule."

Yeah, I get it. A rule is a rule. And enforcers like Bradshaw are throwing stuff on kids' permanent records that wouldn't pass the laugh test in the real world. Will this file note that the two boys "pointed pencils at each other and made shooting noises?" Or will it state something to the effect that the boys broke the school's policy on violence and threatening behavior? My guess is the latter, which will allow anyone perusing the record to imagine the worst.

We can only hope that having these stories reported widely might push a few administrators to consider loosening or removing these so-called "zero tolerance" policies. Unfortunately, to date most administrators (and their policies) seem impervious to public ridicule, and every school-related tragedy just results in a newer, more rigid set of unbreakable rules. Until the day comes when kids can be kids without being suspended for pretending pencils are guns, parents might want to sit their kids down and have a long talk about safe pencil handling and the requirements and responsibilities that come with the "conceal-and-carry" permit they'll be needing before being allowed to start the next school year.

A 7-year-old Anne Arundel County boy was suspended for two days for chewing a breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun and saying, “Bang, bang”— an offense the school described as a threat to other students, according to his family.

The pastry “gun” was a rectangular strawberry-filled bar, akin to a Pop-Tart, that the second-grader had tried to nibble into the shape of a mountain Friday morning, but then found it looked more like a gun, said his father, William “B.J.” Welch.

Yes. A Pop Tart knockoff makes a handy makeshift weapon, perhaps explaining why pastries are no longer served in prisons. When I say "it's come to this," it really has, but it's been a long time coming and there's plenty of precedent.

That's just a sampling. There are many more stories like these out there. There are many that are underreported or never reported, where parents just deal with the ridiculous outcome of zero-tolerance policies. For some reason, many schools still labor under the delusion that "zero tolerance" equals "tough, but fair." It's neither, and utilizing zero tolerance policies simply prunes the whole process back to a disfigured stump devoid of logic, perspective or context.

So, a child eats something and starts playing with his food because it resembles something other than the RDA-approved Pop Tart knockoff. And his school responds by twisting its own weapons policy into a parody of itself. The actual wording pertaining to prohibited items, courtesy of Lowering the Bar, reads like this:

Any gun of any kind, loaded or unloaded, operable or inoperable, including any object other than a firearm which is a look-a-like of a gun. This shall include, but is not limited to, pellet gun, paintball gun, stun gun, taser, BB gun, flare gun, nail gun, and air soft gun.

How does this policy apply to the pastry? That's a great question, and Lowering the Bar doesn't have an answer:

Josh's gun was not a firearm, because it was a pastry, and it seems highly unlikely that it qualified as a gun "look-a-like," again because it was a pastry. It certainly is nothing like any of the "look-a-like" items set forth in the list, largely because those items are not pastries.

The school's logic apparently is that if it vaguely resembles a gun and someone is pretending it's a gun, then it's a gun look-a-like. Case closed.

This, in and of itself, would be pathetic enough. But it gets worse. The school sent home a letter regarding the (non) incident, which hilariously offers the assistance of staff counselors for anyone "troubled" by the weaponized pastry.

Dear Parents and Guardians:

I am writing to let you know about an incident that occurred this morning in one of our classrooms and encourage you to discuss this matter with your child in a manner you deem most appropriate.

During breakfast this morning, one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class. While no physical threats were made and no one [was] harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom.

* * *

As you are aware, the ... Code of Student Conduct and appropriate consequences related to violations of the code are clearly spelled out in the Student Handbook, which was sent home during the first week of school and can be found on our website, www.aacps.org.... If your children express that they are troubled by today's incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week. In general, please remind them of the importance of making good choices.

Kevin Underhill at LTB adds:

Pretty sure that if your children are "troubled" by another kid biting a pastry into something that looks sort of like a gun and waving said pastry around, you have already failed as a parent.

And I'd add that if you've done even a merely passable job as a parent, the only "feeling" your children might want to "share" is that their school is run by officious asshats, even if they haven't quite developed the vocabulary to say that in so many words. (Don't kid yourselves, parents: they're quite capable of swearing well above their grade level.)

This is the nadir of the education system's zero tolerance weapon policies. Zero tolerance does nothing more than relieve the administrative staff from the possibility of having blood on their hands. No situtation is too ridiculous to be taken seriously -- and punished harshly. Reducing every incident to binary ensures that no school employee can ever be held responsible for overreacting to any perceived "threat," no matter how innocuous. In many ways, the education system is a reflection of our current "homeland security" ecosystem where the endless pursuit of "safety" has become the impetus for thousands of terrible policies, all enforced inflexibly.

There's a way to pull out of this nosedive but it involves many, many people being willing to make judgement calls on the fly and able to face the heat should their judgement falter. Unfortunately for many in the system, the risk is much higher than the reward. For many in these positions, the possibility of being wrong is incapacitating and zero tolerance policies relieve this pressure. Trying to steer the system back towards a greater reliance on common sense won't be easy, but continuing to let it drift in its current direction will do nothing to improve the safety and security of our schools, much less our country.

from the let's-get-rational dept

One of the reasons Techdirt rails against exaggerated responses to supposed terrorist threats is that it has caused police forces around the world to lose all sense of proportion -- literally, in the case of this UK story from the Daily Mail.

It began when Ian Driscoll decided to post a picture to his Facebook page. It was of an Action Man doll, accompanied by a toy Alsatian dog. Why? you might ask. Well, "as a laugh", he says, because the Action Man figure looked a lot like him, and he had a real Alsatian -- which sounds entirely reasonable. What Driscoll did not note at the time, though, was that lurking in the background of the picture was another toy: a model mortar.

Unfortunately, a few weeks later, someone else spotted that toy mortar and, mindful of the incessant UK government propaganda about terrorists being everywhere, duly over-reacted and reported the image. Even more unfortunately, the police also over-reacted -- to the extent of sending five officers, two armed with sub-machine guns (and you thought they didn't carry them in the UK), ready to smash down Driscoll's front door and go in with guns blazing against this supposed terrorist cell.

Luckily, Driscoll was there, and was able to defuse the situation by showing them the mortar in question. He was able to point out that it was in fact only slightly larger than the nearby Playstation that was clearly visible in the snap he had posted, and considerably smaller than the table that was also prominent in the Facebook picture. He might even have pointed out that the figure and dog in his upload were quite obviously toys to anyone who spent more than three seconds examining the picture. The police had presumably decided not to waste those precious three seconds before acting. Instead, as a spokesperson later said:

'We are sure that the community would rather we acted quickly on information given to us of this nature, in case it had turned out to be a weapon.'

Well, no, actually: what the community would really like is for the police to use some intelligence before reaching for the sub-machine guns. If they had just stopped and looked carefully at the picture, it would have been evident that there was no possible threat here. And that's likely to be the case for many other incidents around the world where the police have assumed the worst.

That not only represents a huge waste of their valuable time and resources, it also perpetuates the corrosive idea that we should be constantly afraid and ready to report anything and anyone odd or vaguely suspicious, no matter how absurd it would seem to anyone looking at things rationally. This then creates a self-sustaining loop of public fear and police over-reaction. It's time to scale the rhetoric back, and to make common-sense judgments common again.

from the well-that's-just-bullshit dept

At some point, some national group is going to have to get the memo out to local law enforcement agencies within the United States that it is perfectly legal to record them while they operate in public. We've seen case after case after case of citizens having their property taken away or being charged with trumped up crimes all because they pointed a recording device at the police. Hell, some states have tried to enact unconstitutional laws to back up their ill-conceived and unwarranted positions.

All that being said, you just have to hand it to a police force up in Minnesota for the sheer cajones it took to do what they did. It started as other stories have, with a citizen, Andrew Henderson, recording police as they frisked a bloodied man before he was loaded into an ambulance and then having an officer take his recording device away.

The deputy, Jacqueline Muellner, approached him and snatched the camera from his hand, Henderson said.

"We'll just take this for evidence," Muellner said. Their voices were recorded on Henderson's cellphone as they spoke, and Henderson provided a copy of the audio file to the Pioneer Press. "If I end up on YouTube, I'm gonna be upset."

We've seen this kind of thing before, of course. Police use the excuse of evidence collecting to take away recording devices, which is really the only thing they're interested in. It's wrong. We get that. Usually some kind of internal review of the incident is triggered, asses are officially covered, and then the recording device is returned, sometimes after having been wiped. It's a bad enough story as it stands.

And that scenario is almost exactly what happened here, as the spokesman for Ramsey County acknowledged in a quote that citizens have the right to record police. But everyday abusive practices aren't enough for Ramsey County officers, apparently. The only thing that will satisfy them appears to be a new level of bullshit hitherto unseen, because a week later, when Henderson went to retrieve the camera, the police charged him with disorderly conduct and obstruction, with the citation noting that this was due to a "Data privacy HIPAA violation." In case you aren't clear on this, in the blogging industry, we refer to this as a massive amount of bullshit (piles and piles of it).

The allegation that his recording of the incident violated HIPAA, or the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is nonsense, said Jennifer Granick, a specialist on privacy issues at Stanford University Law School. The rule deals with how health care providers handle consumers' health information.

"There's nothing in HIPAA that prevents someone who's not subject to HIPAA from taking photographs on the public streets," Granick said. "HIPAA has absolutely nothing to say about that."

The kicker? The deputy who had taken the camera for "evidence" purposes erased all the footage. The exchange in which she took that camera was audio recorded by Henderson separately on his cell phone, a recording which he still has. I would suggest that if the police do not immediately rescind their trumped up charges against him, Henderson should insist that we take the deputy at her word, assume she collected the camera and its footage as evidence, and then we can all begin discussing how much prison time the deputy should be doing for destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice.

That's no more crazy than anything the police have done in this story.